Closed Practice What You Preach

My favorite example of cultural assimilation comes from the novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé, in which Tituba is introduced as a traditional healer. At one point in the book, one of the Puritans is like, “Hey, Tituba, I want you to put a curse on someone,” and Tituba’s like, “Yeah, I don’t know how to do that, but thanks for thinking of me, I guess?” And the Puritan is like, “Oh, it’s super easy! You just make a cake, except you add a little urine to the flour, and then you get them to eat it. Bam. Cursed!”

I bring this up, because a) it vividly demonstrates how elements of European witchcraft could have been transmitted into Hoodoo over time, and b) one of the consistent arguments I’ve seen in favor of cultural appropriation is, “Well, [insert Folk Magic of the Moment here] takes from other magical systems, so I can take whatever I want from it.”

But as we know, applying destructive order to creative disorder results in destructive disorder. Ergo, forcing an appropriative mentality onto an assimilative model ends badly: It actively contributes to marginalization, and it stamps out the cultural traditions that marginalized groups are trying to protect and preserve.

And whether we want to believe it or not, we make things worse when we tack conditions onto allyship — like when we refuse to let marginalized groups take the lead in discussions on cultural appropriation. But if we can force ourselves to listen, and to accept the nuances of open and closed practices on a case-by-case basis, we’ll be helping to make the greater occult world a little safer for everyone involved.